


What Makes Heaven Far

by EverybodyKnowsIt



Series: I love you as the plant that never blooms [2]
Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Angst with NO happy ending this time, Growing Up and Growing Pains, Haha... Jk... Unless?, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, M/M, Mark is definitely Not in love with Hyuck, Sad Bitch Hours Continue, Unrequited Love, non-au, sometimes things hurt and that's okay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-17
Updated: 2019-10-17
Packaged: 2020-12-21 11:30:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,548
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21074189
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EverybodyKnowsIt/pseuds/EverybodyKnowsIt
Summary: Mark met God in the shape of a boy and Mark met the devil in how he craves.





	What Makes Heaven Far

This is the start of the end: a private practice room with a heart laid bare on the floor and a boy eager for a taste of heaven.

“I think-- I _know_ I love you,” Donghyuck says, with all the trembling bravery of a soldier marching into a battle he won’t win.

_ I don’t_, Mark says, but he can’t help but think the way tears stick Donghyuck’s eyelashes together looks lovely enough to be written in poetry, written in ink and stone and blood and anything Mark could get his hands on.

He doesn’t quite remember what he says, but he knows he made it cruel enough to hurt, because Mark is going to be the best, top of the industry and golden boy of Korea, and nothing and no one will get in his way.

His chest aches as he walks through the halls on his way back to the dorms, aches like something lost and something broken, but you never miss what you’ve never known, yeah?

_ promise me things will be different next time _ he prays, and under what might be moonlight or city streetlamps, God pretends to agree.

* * *

Jaehyun nudges him in the shoulder as Mark leans back on his stool, as far as he can go without toppling to the ground. It’s a fansign and his fingers ache with the signatures, nails smeared blue to the knuckle, but they still want more. 

Jaehyun smiles, not to Mark but to the crowd past him: he can tell by the minute strain of it, the flinch of tendon in his perfect jaw. There’s a microphone proferred in one hand, “They want to to know about your childhood, Mark.” He says. “Tell them,” and his eyes are kind, because Jaehyun _ is_, to the core and bone of him, but it’s not a suggestion all the same.

_ Childhood_, he thinks. _ What’s childhood? It’s what made me. _

_Wooden church pews and incense burning heavy in his throat, walking home from Sunday school and the tree-limbs are frozen, virgin hair the color of liquorice, a quiet flight across the ocean, a foreign tongue butchered through his teeth, a single cigarette snuck from Johnny’s pocket that he was too afraid to light,_ _orange juice with pulp and bubblegum pop, a boy who shares his last name and his dorm and his dream, Donghyuck’s puckered lips as he leans in to kiss the puff of his cheeks--_

_ Donghyuck leaves a smear of cherry chapstick in his wake. _

_ Mark doesn’t wipe it off. _

Mark takes the microphone, hands trembling, “My childhood--” He starts, voice rasping. He clears his throat and tries again, “In sixth grade, I played the flute...”

It isn’t allowed for there to be more of him. This he knows.

* * *

When they shared a room--not anymore, not since things fell apart in that practice room at midnight and Donghyuck silently switched with Doyoung the next day--the boundaries blurred so fuzzy between them that Mark could almost pretend Donghyuck was something he was allowed to have.

He gets home late most days, because his mind only quiets when the bones of his hands are seeping in ink. He records and he dances and he writes and writes and writes until he forgets that he has to go home to Donghyuck lying on the bed with his legs spread long and bare in shorts, humming a melody under his breath.

_ Welcome home, hyung_, he always says--softly, in that way he only does in _ their _ room--and the way Mark’s heart lurches hot and brutal against his ribs never falters, not once.

The only time Donghyuck was safe to be around was when he was sleeping. _ It was the only time he was quiet_, Mark thinks bittersweet while he stares at the curve of Donghyuck’s back as he stretches on the practice room floor, _ except now he's quiet all the time. _

Mark remembers how the slyness of his eyes used to dissolve as he fell asleep, turned his face into something almost delicate, comely in the way dangerous creatures are at rest.

_ You’re mine_, he would think, and he allowed himself to reach out and touch, because God can’t see sin in the dark. _ Mine, mine, mine in the way that dark things belong to deep water. _

When Donghyuck wasn’t awake to catch him, he would allow himself a hand on the slope of Donghyuck’s cheekbone and fingers mimicking the way Donghyuck would rake through his hair in the light of day.

Mark knows his hands weren’t gentle and he couldn’t bring himself to care, not when this was all he could ever allow himself to have.

He thought he would get better when they switched rooms, that with distance he would learn how to quit starving for snippets of sleepworn skin and almondrust eyes, the ivory of Donghyuck’s teeth when Mark makes him laugh, but instead it gets worse, he gets hungrier.

He hears Donghyuck’s music bleeding through the walls of the room next to his, and he feels the loss like a phantom limb.

Mark writes--

_ every double-joint every mole i can trace the way your lip swells when you bite it with my eyes closed-- _

They dyed Donghyuck’s hair for the comeback, cinnamon honey curls that print behind Mark’s eyelids. He wants to say it looks good, looks more than _ good_, that he wants to pull it and hear the sound Donghyuck makes when he does, that he’s the prettiest thing he’s ever seen, that he’s sorry, that he wants Donghyuck to come back. The words die in his mouth before they’re even formed. 

He’s selfish. He’s a coward. He’s so, so, foolishly in love.

Instead, Mark writes-- 

_ you breathe my name different the vowels of it they sigh in your mouth-- _

He sits alone in the room that doesn’t belong to Donghyuck anymore, and he thinks that while he used to complain about the noise, he doesn’t truly like the quiet either.

_ Silly Mark-hyung,_ Donghyuck used to laugh as Mark juggled _ 127 _ and _ Dream _ and _ U _ promotions, his eyes teasing, but not enough to hide his concern. _ You can’t have it all. _

Donghyuck is much more clever than Mark gave him credit for, because on his knees at the top of the world, Mark realizes he really can’t.

* * *

_ what is lee donghyuck to you, _ a comment asks, and it sounds like an accusation, one that Mark can’t afford.

_ What is Lee Donghyuck,_ he briefly wonders. He steals a glance at the boy sitting next to him--the intersection of everything repulsive and beautiful and formidable all wrapped-up pretty in a chrome smile and scrap metal muscle--and he feels smothered like oil on water.

_ What is Lee Donghyuck? _

Donghyuck is harbinger of midsummer. 

Donghyuck is breath half-held before the gun fires. 

Donghyuck is what makes heaven far.

“Haechan is nothing to me,” he says, and lying is easier than he thought it’d be. If Mark knew what was good for him he would stop here. He would let what’s dead die. But Mark was taught early that beauty and longing were not blessings but omens, and he desperately carves his words into something sharp enough to save him. “Maybe, if he improves his singing, someday I could call him a valued peer.”

He knows he’s gone too far when he feels the silence settle on the lot of them like a blanket. Donghyuck smiles but it’s ugly, as ugly as Mark thinks he could ever be. Donghyuck grins with too many teeth, eyes wide and blank as paper, “I don’t think any amount of perfection could win Mark-hyung’s affection.” Donghyuck’s voice is sweet like syrup, settling thick in the room and sinking all of them in it, “Some people just never learned how to love right.”

Some rotting little part of Mark wants to bite back, _ neither do you, you never learned to love purely, love righteously, __love the way God taught-- _and it’s so twisted, so fucking mean that he feels sick to his stomach.

The two of them are quiet for the rest of the V-Live, and after the show when Donghyuck pushes him to the ground spitting curses with hellfire reckoning in his eyes, Mark stays silent. 

There’s nothing more to say, he thinks, nothing left to break. 

He sits on the floor for a long time, and the tile is so cold Mark wonders if God is even here.

He feels hollow. He feels holy.

* * *

Back before Donghyuck cracked his heart on Mark Lee’s edges, back before Mark learned love and shame and how they fester in him, they were friends.

It’s the day before his debut and his heart feels so full he worries it’s going to spill over into the pleather cafe booth they’ve crammed themselves in, spill and drown them both in his desperation: Desperation for sin, desperation for freedom from sin, desperation for the sake of itself, because that’s all Mark has ever known.

He wants to scream, he wants to run as far and as fast as he can from Seoul: the valley of cannibals and Midas and desecration. He wants to consume it whole. Instead, he simmers in his seat and takes a bite of dry croissant.

Donghyuck absentmindedly mouths the straw of his iced latte and Mark swallows at the glimpse of pink tongue. Donghyuck was sculpted pretty as a tool of the trade, but there’s always been a flicker of something naked--something burned raw--behind his eyes that tears Mark to pieces. 

It makes him want to do something worth going to Hell for, and his heart drums so loud he thinks Donghyuck might be able to hear his soul rot.

“Are you ever scared?” Mark asks. Because Mark is, every day, terrified of spilling his guts and drowning in the wreckage of it; but he allows himself a taste, because Donghyuck is pretty and plucky and Mark at sixteen doesn’t know any better than to soak in the presence of him.

“Fear is useless and ephemeral,” Donghyuck says lightly, and _ oh God _ how Mark wishes that were true. 

There is too much to fear and for too good a reason.

Instead he smiles at the way Donghyuck’s bangs peek out from under his hoodie, “You don’t even know how to _ spell _ ephemeral.” This makes Donghyuck laugh and choke on his coffee, ember eyes narrowing into crescents as he grins through a bout of coughing, and Mark rests easy knowing that fame will soon kill things like infatuation and fear, will soon poison the weakness in him.

Perhaps blind faith and doubt are not too different. Perhaps sometimes they’re even the same thing.

* * *

There’s a photocard marking the pages of his bible, worn and folded but still glossy, tucked between lines of scripture. 

_ Chew-chew-chew-chew-chewing gum _ it shouts neon pink, and Mark digs the book out of his sock drawer to stare at the way Donghyuck’s hair curls under his snapback.

He rifles through the history of them--the history of Mark and Donghyuck--and he misses the time when he didn’t carry so much want in him; when Donghyuck hadn’t yet figured out how to yearn. 

He’d like to kiss that yearning from his skin.

* * *

“My mom used to say that I was some kind of godless creature,” he explains to Mark one day, heedless as Doyoung nags the both of them for the latest trouble _ Donghyuck _stirred up. “Some faerie changeling the forest stole and the ocean gave back.”

Mark writes, like he always does.

_ you may be a godless creature, but baby I’m a war-machine. _

Mark loves God, and even though Donghyuck is what makes heaven far, Mark tried to love him too.

It’s not always that easy. 

He wishes Donghyuck knew that it’s not always that easy. 

* * *

Sometimes the pages Mark writes tangle themselves so tight they can’t be pieced into songs, convoluted prose more prayer than lyric. 

_ please god let me find haven from him so i can rip out what’s human in me-- _

_ i know lust like a language i know how it plagues you-- _

_ you are my everything, michelangelo’s david and the angels in the eaves, and i will throw you away so i can eat the world whole im sorry im sorry im sorry-- _

_ i’m so, so, sorry. _

These pages, he burns. 

He stares at the paper blackened and shriveling between his fingers. Mark wonders if God can hear him. 

Mark wonders if God cares.

* * *

He is twelve years old when his best friend’s older brother stops going to church.

He asks his mother why, because he asked his friend Thomas, but Thomas wouldn’t tell him and he wishes he was older so that he could get all the answers to all his questions. He asks his mother why Thomas’ brother has stopped coming on Sundays, because he was the best tenor in the choir and now it just doesn’t sound the same. 

She stills where she stands in the kitchen cutting vegetables, shoulders tense, “That boy made poor choices.” She says, and the knife runs through a carrot with a dull _ thump_. “He’s lost God, Minhyung. His mother found him in his room with--”

She trails off quietly, as if to finish the thought would bring the devil into their own kitchen. She puts the knife down on the counter and gently ruffles his hair, “You’ll marry a nice girl one day, darling. You’ll make us proud, won’t you?”

There’s Malbec wine staining his father’s glass scarlet, and his voice is resolute from where he interrupts from behind them, “Of course he will.” 

And that’s the end of it.

Mark feels unsettled, somewhere deep and unexplainable, and for what is probably the first time in his life, he leaves to voluntarily finish his homework.

As he makes his way up the stairs he catches one last snippet of hushed conversation.

_ No son of mine will rot in hell for that, _his father says.

_ No son of mine. _

* * *

“Everyone’s dying to know Mark,” 

_ They are, they always are, the nation and its grasping fingers reaching down my throat, they want to know me till they have me, I don’t want this I want him-- _

“What’s your ideal type?”

_ Every time I look in the mirror I lose myself a little more, do you know? Do you care? Every smear of graphite on my skin makes me lose my mind a little more-- _

“Who’s the type of person to get the little lion on his knees?” 

_ I have slow and confusing dreams of him pushing me to my knees, when I wake up the ghost of him is still warm beside me, I want to hear him sing against my skin, it’s drippin’ love love-- _

“Girls,” he says, mouth opening with all the automation of a machine. It’s doesn’t feel like a lie, exactly, but it doesn’t feel like the truth either. He doesn’t look at Donghyuck, he won’t. He forges ahead, even when the words feel thick and cement heavy on his tongue, “I like pretty girls-- pretty girls with long black hair.” And pretty boys, maybe. Pretty boys with slippery smiles and glacial teeth, hair slicked-back and bleached antique-silver. Pretty boys who warble love songs under blinding lights and bring the whole world to their feet. 

Pretty boys named Lee Donghyuck.

Because Mark _ does _ like girls, all the softness and the sharpness of them and the way they look up at him from under darkened lashes, but it was Donghyuck who taught him how to ache.

Because while Donghyuck doesn’t blush, he’ll freckle under the sun and that’s good enough.

He finishes the rest of the show in a daze, and when he looks up and sees the footage played back he wonders who that laughing boy is, wide-eyed and sharp-boned, and it takes a moment to realize it’s him. He wonders how famous he’ll have to be to stop feeling like a stranger in his own skin. He wonders if Donghyuck ever feels the same. If any of them do.

Donghyuck was unstoppable today, an imploding star in his own right. The hosts cooed over the slightness of his frame and the breadth of his smile, but Mark thinks there’s something missing there, all too much saltwater and not enough sweetness. Mark knows because it’s the way Donghyuck looks at him, these days.

He follows Donghyuck after the segment finishes, and maybe he can’t find it in himself to say sorry, but Donghyuck _ has _to understand why Mark is the way he is, why he cannot love the way he wants to love. But Taeyong beats him to it, slipping into the bathroom and letting the door slam in Mark’s face without a single glance. Maybe he deserved that one, he thinks, just maybe.

He stands, motionless, listening to Donghyuck crying in the bathroom and he can’t bring himself to call out his name and Mark wonders where this all went ugly.

* * *

Mark used to dream about having an older brother like Johnny, a _ real _ one, someone taller and steady and anchored to the ground, someone who knows what to do when Mark never does. He didn’t think that in leaning on Johnny, he was building someone who knew how to see through him, to the worst of him, to the best of him. 

_ Johnny is my brother,_ he always says on camera, but he always means it.

“I think you’re overcomplicating things with him,” Johnny says one day from the driver’s seat, hands firm on the wheel. Johnny is Mark’s brother, if not by blood then by sweat and tears, and Mark immediately knows what he’s implying by the sternness of his tone.

In rising to the top with someone, you learn what breaks them into little, tiny pieces, and Johnny knows the tender bits in Mark’s armor better than anyone. “I think you should mind your own business,” he replies, and Mark tries to sound serious, but his voice cracks and he ends up sounding like a child anyway. He hunches in his seat and intently looks at his phone, scrolling through the newest _ Dream _ comeback trailer on Twitter.

Haechan glows in the lights and the leather, dirty-blooded and golden-tongued.

“Mark--” Johnny starts, and God how he _ hates _ when Johnny uses that tone, like Mark is too young and too stupid to know what’s best for himself, like Johnny has turned him inside out and peered into the darkest part of his brain, like Mark’s not _ good enough, doing enough, trying enough-- _

“I don’t want to hurt him,” Mark cuts him off, sullen.

“Bullshit,” Johnny responds, but his voice is on the fond-side of neutral. “You’ve never had any problems taking what you want.”

“_He’ll ruin me,_” Mark snaps, like he doesn’t dream about all the ways Donghyuck could do just that.

Johnny peers at him out of the corner of his dark, sloe eyes, a laugh hiding under his breath that only makes Mark’s blood reach boiling point, “Then let him.”

Johnny is his brother and his friend and his mentor, but he doesn’t understand. He never will. Mark is a son of God and pride of the nation, and he will burn too bright and too pure to ever be held in Donghyuck’s hands.

He will make sure of this.

After thirty seconds of Mark’s silence, Johnny sighs again, and he still sounds fond, but maybe a little less, Mark thinks. Johnny pulls into the McDonald’s drive-through, which he only does if the day is _ especially _ bad and Mark is _ extra _bitchy, “A little emotional vulnerability won’t kill you, Mark.”

Mark nods as Johnny hands him his fries, but on the inside, he knows there are some things you just can’t ask for, some things that God and Fame won’t give.

* * *

It’s years later and Mark is on top of the world, just like he always said he would be, just as it was written in stone. And maybe gold, glory and God don’t taste as sweet on his tongue as he thought, but right now he’s far too rich--far too _ wasted_\--for things like this to matter. Because he and Donghyuck have _ made it,_ just like Mark promised, all those years ago. 

Mark loves Los Angeles, because the sun never sets and the supermarkets never close and the fluorescent lights never dim and _nothing matters _here, except looking at Donghyuck over drunken In-N-Out burgers, there’s maybe one thing that does.

He stumbles into their hotel room, arm slung over Donghyuck’s shoulder and bathing in the warmth bleeding from the thin shirt covering his skin, just about to say something he maybe _ won’t _regret, when Donghyuck lays him on the couch.

His eyes are so heavy, heavy and tired and he feels a little more alone then he usually allows himself to. He looks at Donghyuck, all three copies of him swimming in front of Mark’s vision. There are some things he can say, some things he can’t ever afford to.

What he does say: _you’re-- hyuckie-- you're my tiny kind of tragedy_

What he doesn’t: _ i’ve never stopped loving you i don’t want to think you’ve stopped loving me _

He sees Donghyuck laugh as he leaves, murmuring something in response that he can’t hear, and then Mark is asleep.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to jsnoopy (stan her fic The Way, cowards) for listening to my neverending angsting with this piece,,, ily <3
> 
> be sad with me about markhyuck on twitter @sidstarbursts


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